Bart Curtis Pushaw

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As of Fall 2023, I am transitioning to a new position outside of KU. For all inquiries, please write to me at: bart-pushaw@utc.edu.

Bart Pushaw is a historian of the art of the colonial Americas, with a particular focus on the Circumpolar North and Central America between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. As a Postdoctoral Fellow in the international research project The Art of Nordic Colonialism: Writing Transcultural Art Histories, he is concerned with the correspondences of art and material culture between the Indigenous Arctic and the Black Atlantic. Beginning in January 2022, he will serve as a Mads Øvlisen Postdoctoral Fellow of the Novo Nordisk Foundation to complete his first book, tentatively titled Indulgent Images: Indigenous Artists of the Colonial Arctic. The study establishes a vital historicity to the intra-Indigenous networks of artistic exchange that took place across Sápmi, Kalaallit Nunaat, Inuit Nunangat, and Alaska in the early colonial period (ca. 1700-1900), revealing how Indigenous artists of the Arctic intervened into global period discourse that had racialized their land and livelihood as aberrant.

Particularly invested in the stakes of art history’s global turn, he is dedicated to cultivating art historical literacy across the discipline’s subfields in his teaching and scholarship. 

Forthcoming publications tease out the complex materiality of early Inuit printmaking; the global entanglements of Inuit textiles in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and the role of art as a tool of anti-colonial insurgency in early colonial Alaska.

His research has been supported by the Novo Nordisk Foundation (2022-2024), the New Carlsberg Foundation (2019-2022), the Fulbright Program (2013-14), the American-Scandinavian Foundation (2017-18), and the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies (2018).